The present invention relates to a method, a device, and a machine for washing and drying a linen product such as a towel, and more specifically a method, a device, and a machine for realizing a remarkable reduction of a drying time.
A linen product such as a dirty towel is carried by a conveyor to a washing machine, and then fed and washed in the washing machine, and further transferred to a drying machine after spin-drying, and next to that fed and dried in the drying machine.
A conventional drying machine comprises a rotary drum containing a wash in a chamber, a steam heater for supplying a blow of hot air into the chamber, and an exhaust fan for ventilating the interior of the chamber, wherein the blow of hot air raised up to a high temperature through heat-exchange in the steam heater is blown in the wet wash fed within the rotary drum, and at the same time, the blow of hot air cooled down to a low temperature after having been blown in the wash is exhausted to make the wash dried out.
Conventionally, the wash to be dried next is made to stand by in front of the drying machine in order to obtain high washing efficiency while the wet wash is being dried in the drying machine, and the wash on standby is thrown into the drying machine immediately after taking out the already dried wash.
However, since the wash to be dried next is made to stand by in front of the drying machine (for example, standby time is about 15-20 minutes) during drying the wash in the drying machine as described above, a total drying time requires a time resulting in poor washing efficiency.
Moreover, when the next wash is made to stand by in front of the drying machine until the preceding wash is dried out, the wash in the wet state decreases in a temperature by further cooling before it is thrown into the drying machine. Therefore, the time required for drying out the wash becomes far longer to result in poorer efficiency.
The present invention is a method that a blow of hot air exhausted from a drying machine is utilized to preliminarily dry an article to be dried which has been thrown in a preliminary drying machine by the blow of hot air before final drying. That is to say, while a blow of hot air is supplied to the drying machine so as to finally dry the article to be dried, a blow of hot air exhausted from the drying machine is introduced into the preliminary drying machine so as to preliminarily dry the article to be dried before final drying, and then the article to be dried contained in the preliminary drying machine is transferred to said drying machine for final drying.
The blow of hot air introduced during final drying is, for example, at a high temperature of about 160xc2x0 C., and the blow of hot air exhausted comes to about 100xc2x0 C. When the temperature of the hot air exhausted is about 100xc2x0 C., it is enough to preliminarily dry a wet article to be dried after having been washed.
In this way, since the article to be dried before final drying is dried using the blow of hot air generated during the final drying, while the final drying is proceeding, a drying time during final drying of the preliminarily dried article to be dried can be remarkably reduced resulting in a high drying efficiency.